Property Rights and Honest Behavior

We study whether the formalization of property rights affects honest behavior. We conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment based on a standard dice-rolling task in rural Benin, in the same villages where, ten years earlier, a large-scale randomized controlled trial introduced the formalization of land property rights. We find that individuals whose land rights were formalized exhibit significantly stronger preferences for truth-telling. This effect is entirely driven by women with direct exposure to the reform, while no comparable effect is observed among men or at the village level alone. A natural interpretation is that formalization represents a more salient institutional change for women—whose land claims under customary tenure are typically weaker and more contingent—than for men, for whom property rights are already relatively more secure. Our findings thus suggest that property-rights institutions shape moral preferences particularly when they meaningfully alter individuals’ economic and legal status, supporting the view that institutions and moral behavior coevolve.